Where Parents Get Their Power: Evidence from The Brothers Karamazov

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Each winter for the last several years I’ve read a long a novel. With one exception they’ve been Russian. Anna Karenina in 2008. Middlemarch in 2009 (which I wrote about here). War and Peace in 2010 (which I wrote about here). This year it’s The Brothers Karamazov, which I had a false start with a decade ago on a beach vacation, and which has been staring at me on our bookshelf ever since. It also bears the potentially significant distinction of being the very last work of fiction my wife Caroline read before we met in 2002.

Last night I hustled my two young sons Jay and Wally off to bed (or at least tried to — Jay, who is two-and-a-haaaaalf, wont be hustled anywhere) in anticipation of reading the famous “Grand Inquisitor” chapter. A decade earlier I’d been assigned “The Grand Inquisitor” as a standalone text in a college class on moral reasoning. Then I hadn’t gotten much out of it. Last night I was excited to see if it had improved in the intervening ten years.

“The Grand Inquisitor” is a supremely strange chapter — one of the most unique things I’ve read in literature. It takes the form of a parable, told by the atheist Ivan Karamazov to his younger brother Alyosha, a novice monk. The parable is set in 16th-century Portugal and it recounts a conversation between an aged high-ranking official in the Catholic Church known as the Grand Inquisitor and a man who arrives in town performing miracles that give rise to the suspicion that he’s the Second Coming of Christ.

The Grand Inquisitor should rejoice before this man, but instead he’s furious. He has him imprisoned and confronts him in his cell. The Grand Inquisitor berates Christ that he has no business returning to earth — he tells him that he lost all legitimacy as a leader of men when he made three fateful choices retold in the Bible in the Temptation of Christ.

In the Temptation of Christ, Jesus has been fasting in the desert for 40 days when the Devil appears to him with three offers. First the Devil asks Christ to turn stones into loaves in order to relieve his hunger. Christ declines to perform the miracle. Then the Devil tells Christ to prove that he is the Son of God by falling from a high cliff, trusting that angels will catch him. Christ declines. Finally, the Devil offers to give Christ dominion over all the kingdoms of men if Christ agrees to worship him. Again, Christ declines.

The Temptation of Christ is usually understood as evidence of Christ’s divinity and his humanity — he was tempted, like a man, but resisted temptation, like God. The Grand Inquisitor understands Christ’s refusals differently, however; in his view Christ declined each temptation based on a naïve view of human nature.

As the Grand Inquisitor tells it, Christ knew that he’d assume an absolute power over mankind if he accepted the Devil’s offers – a power that he didn’t want. The Grand Inquisitor explains that there are three foundations on which the powerful rule — miracle, mystery, and authority — each of which would have been manifest in Christ had he given in to the Devil’s temptations.

So why did Christ refuse to perform acts that would have given him such authority over humankind? The Grand Inquisitor imputes that Christ refused this authority because he did not want to deny people their free will. He charges that Christ knew that accepting the Devil’s temptations would have resulted in humanity being compelled to obedience, when what Christ really wanted was for people to understand Good and Evil for themselves, and to come to faith free of coercion, through the exercise of their own reason and will.

What a Pollyanna, the Grand Inquisitor mocks Christ! In the Grand Inquisitor’s view people are too weak for freedom. Just look around at all the ruin and despair on earth he says to Christ. This is what results when people are left to be free:

Freedom, free reason, and science will lead them into such a maze, and confront them with such miracles and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves; others, unruly but feeble, will exterminate each other; and the remaining third, feeble and wretched, will crawl to our [the Catholic Church’s] feet and cry out to us: “Yes, you were right, you alone possess his mystery, and we are coming back to you — save us from ourselves.”

What people really crave, the Grand Inquisitor says, is someone to rule them. This is what the Catholic Church provides he says — an absolute authority, a sanctuary from freedom — and he tells Christ to leave town immediately, lest he disrupt the essential edifice the pontiffs have built the last 1500 years.

My youngest son Wally is seven-months-old and still occasionally needs to be walked back to sleep at night. The night I read “The Grand Inquisitor” he woke up a little after 2am. As I paced him back and forth in his downstairs room, I thought about the pages I’d read earlier that evening. It occurred to me that the Grand Inquisitor’s interpretation of the Temptation of Christ effectively describes the power I hold over my two sons.

In their eyes I perform countless miracles each day. Occasionally these are bona fide feats, like last week, when I pried apart two stuck Legos that had resisted every effort of my little son’s fingers. More often, though, they’re more pedestrian achievements like reaching high into cabinets my sons cannot reach, or promising that in 10 minutes their mom will walk through the front door, and then she does.

I possess the power of mystery, too. If my two-year-old son Jay had the wherewithal he might ask, “Who is this man who claims to have given me life? Where did he learn to pee standing up? How is it that he sees me even when I put my hands over my eyes? It is beyond my ability to comprehend him, so I accept and submit to the mystery of his existence.”

And of course, authority. This fall I told Jay that on October 31 he had to walk around our neighborhood dressed as a cow. Then for two weeks after that I told him precisely how many pieces of Halloween candy he could eat each day. To him I am the greatest power on earth.

This is all a good thing. Small children in possession of too much freedom are a dangerous thing. Left to their own devices my sons would eat yogurt all day (Jay), spend hours gnawing on cardboard (Wally), and put their hands in all manner of disgusting places with no regard for the teeming germs (both of them). Just like the Grand Inquisitor said, I save my sons from themselves.

But eventually, of course, they’ll be old enough to save themselves. I imagine they’ll free themselves from the power of my miracles first. My mystery may last longer — I’m 30 and my own father still appears to me with a certain unfathomable aura — but as Jay and Wally grow up they’ll discover that there are more interesting mysteries in the world than me.

As for my authority, well, that will be a negotiated withdrawal. When they’re ready to handle freedom they can have more of it, and if I’m slow to recognize their progress I’m sure they’ll let me know.

I hope neither Jay nor Wally grows up to be like any of the Karamazov brothers (at least not as they’re depicted through page 367 of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which is where I am now). Still, there is something beautiful about this expression of Ivan’s, which comes a couple chapters before “The Grand Inquisitor.” It speaks to feelings that you can only experience when you have the power to decide for yourself what’s valuable in the world:

Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one’s heart, out of old habit.

1.
When I started to dream about my father, every one started like this:

Me: It’s good to see you.
Him: It’s good to see you.
Me: I thought you died.
Him: I didn’t die. I was somewhere else.

And then the dream goes the way it will, the way all dreams go, to lunacy, and then it ends, always, before the cancer rots his insides, as it did in real life, turning him sallow and gray so suddenly that after he was in the hospital just a few days I could see, for the first time ever, the outline of his cheekbones. He was 59 years old. I was 15.

For years, decades, I did not dream of my father. I thought of him. I resented him occasionally for my imperfect childhood. Never was he in my dreams. Sometimes I wondered why that was. Everyone dreams of the dead, sooner or later.

2.It wasn’t until 1900 that Sigmund Freud published his landmark work, The Interpretation of Dreams, which advanced his theory that all dreams are wish fulfillment; that the unconscious is entirely animalistic, instinctual, and sexual, and dreams a way of concealing one’s basest urges from the waking mind. This was disputed by his protégé, Carl Jung, who agreed with Freud on the existence of the unconscious, but viewed dreams as a window to it. Nightmares, according to Jung, are the mind’s way of smoothing over a past trauma through repeated exposure to it.

The science and study of dreams and their meanings, if they have any, continues. There is considerable scientific evidence in favor of the theory that all of it is meaningless, that dreams are simply the product of “activation-synthesis,” a random process by which electrical brain impulses gather indiscriminate thoughts and images from our memories, mainly in the deeper recesses of the amygdala and hippocampus.

In the meantime you can’t blame a man for trying to figure out why he has started dreaming about his father, 35 years dead and buried. Dreams that drive him to boxes of curled, dusty photos and conversations with long-forgotten relatives in service of reconstructing a man and a life he never satisfactorily knew: what 15-years-old boy really knows his father?

3.
My father was the fourth of four children, born in 1922 in Newark, N.J., to a pair of German immigrants. His father, John, made a decent living as a tool-and-dye man even during the Great Depression, but he was an incurable drunk and most days headed straight to the bar after work to drink away all that currency. If it wasn’t bad enough that his family went hungry while he drowned his demons, they also caught hell when the bars closed and he and the rest of the regulars spilled back onto civilization. He handed out 3 a.m. beatings like so many whiskey shots.

When little John, their first-born son, was still in his short pants, his mother would send him down to the bar to try to liberate some grocery money. He’d peer through the windows from the curb, trying to assess his father’s degree of drunkenness. If he saw some indication of retreating wits but general lucidity, he’d hang around outside, kill some time.

Eventually, when the old man was good and sloppy, John would slink in, wedge himself into the crowd, and try to slip a few bills out of his father’s pocket. He’d catch a beating for it later — if someone in the bar ratted him out or if the old man’s stupor was such that he could still detect and recognize a close relative. But he’d catch a beating later anyhow, so what was the difference?

Frequently, John protected his little brother, my dad, from their father. Seven years older, he took the brunt of it, the way dutiful eldest sons of drunken brutes always have. By the time my dad was old enough to really understand the hell of it, the worst had more or less passed. The old man was still a drunk, but he wasn’t around enough to terrorize everyone. He’d disappear for days, weeks at a time. Drunken binges. Eventually he moved out altogether.

I know this because when I was about 10 years old I asked my dad to help me fix a flat tire on my bicycle — the second flat I had gotten that week. He’d just gotten home from work, was tired, and as he wedged the handle of a claw hammer between the frame and the tire to keep the wheel in place, he snapped, “Do you think my father was around to help me do this kind of stuff?”

A few years before that, my grandfather had come to live with us, the result of having been evicted from his apartment and arrested following an incident in which, while hopelessly drunk and, probably not coincidentally, naked, he chased his landlady around the apartment building in which he lived while waving a butcher knife. It seems now a curiosity that my parents subsequently made available to him a basement bedroom in a home where three young children lived, and even more so given our proximity directly across the road from the neighborhood tavern. The arrangement was doomed at the start.

I remember my mother berating him in the kitchen for doing the inevitable, and my father, standing behind her, looking defeated, ashamed, trying to keep the peace. “Grandpa” moved out a short while later and recalling now the interactions between he and my father, I get the sense that if my father resented him for his myriad and profound failures, that resentment was equal in measure to the desire for his approval.

Years later, when Alzheimer’s consumed my grandfather and landed him in a nursing home, we visited him. “Dad, don’t you recognize me?” my father pleaded. “No!” he snapped and turned away. The ride home was silent, and grandpa died in that nursing home at 96 years old in 1985, outliving both his sons. I’ve always felt it a minor tragedy that in his last years he had no recollection of what a shit he’d been, the disease effectively absolving him.

Dreaming, then, is, in part, a kind of mood regulator. “The dream process that actively mediates the negative mood associated with some waking experience seems to have the effect of stabilizing a better morning mood and that mood progressively improves.”

5.
I did not shed a tear at my father’s funeral. I don’t know how I could be expected to. It would be like expecting an adolescent maple tree to weep at the loss of the sun: He’s too naïve and it’s too large for him to comprehend. So he goes on for a while just being a maple and for some time nothing changes. He’s a maple. I pondered that perhaps the sudden and regular appearance of my father in my dreams represents a kind of delayed grieving, and that maybe these dreams will somehow bring on the “closure” that is so coveted and revered among mourners and survivors who appear on daytime talk shows and crime dramas. Maybe the dreams mean I have never “processed” the loss.

“That’s a hypothesis. It’s not been my clinical experience,” Dr. Pauline Boss told me in an email. Boss is the author of several books about grief and loss, most notably Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. “I don’t believe in ‘closure’ so there’s an element of grief that we live with when we’ve lost someone we love and I consider that normal that you might be sad at a certain time five years, 20 years, a generation later,” she wrote.

“I think the proposition I would put forth is the more a person can discuss their dreams the more likely they are to be on the road to health, and I don’t mean closure or recovery,” she said. “We live with loss across the lifespan. You don’t get over it; you learn to live with it.”

Boss said she still dreams of her father, who died 20 years ago, and of her younger brother, who died from polio at age 13, the summer before Jonas Salk’s revolutionary vaccine effectively eradicated the disease worldwide.

6.
My grandparents divorced in the early-’40s. Given my grandfather’s chronic absenteeism, it didn’t much matter. My dad, at 19, was already a man, even if he didn’t entirely look it. Taking after his mother’s side of the family, he stopped growing at about 5’8” and retained a generous layer of baby fat, which made him look younger than he was (and which clung to him for the rest of his life). Moreover, whereas his older siblings each portrayed a classic German stoicism informed further by the harshness of their upbringing, he was outgoing and garrulous, with a large personality and generous sense of humor.

As a middle-aged man he kidded around with the waitress and with the mechanic and with the cashier at the supermarket, and with the kids when he got home from work. Photos taken during his youth show him grinning merrily.

He dropped out of high school and in November 1942 followed his big brother into the Army to save the world from the Nazis. Basic training was at Camp Edwards in Massachusetts. It was from there that he began writing endearingly self-conscious love letters to his sweetheart back home, a tall, curly-haired, and freckled brunette with whom he’d fallen in love not long before.

Priscilla Bescherer was born in Newark in 1925, the second-youngest of seven children who raised her when their parents died few years later. She was fun-loving and energetic and, like Bill, loved to laugh. She had a magnificent space between her two front teeth, and, as he would later discover, an explosive temper that complemented a remarkable capacity for self-pity. More than anything, she wanted kids.

They married in 1943, and shortly after, he was shipped off to Luzon and then New Guinea. He achieved the rank of “Technician 5th grade” before being honorably discharged in January 1946. He went to school and received certificates in tool-and-dye making, and later landed a job as a machinist at an electrical instrument company in Newark. Soon they moved to the suburbs and for the next 10 years tried unsuccessfully to have kids. To help fill the hole their childlessness created, they took in foster children, and then in 1957 adopted a baby girl and named her Patti Ann. My father was 35 years old.

7.
The romantics believe that when we see the dead in our dreams, it is because they are reaching out to us from another existence — the afterlife. The Internet is lousy with all manner of paranormal mystics, psychics, and others who claim to connect with the dead and in many cases offer to teach you, for a small fee, how to do the same. I wasn’t able to convince a single laborer in the paranormal arts to speak with me, but one, Anne Reith, co-director of the Impart Wisdom & Wellness Center and director of the Institute for Mediumship, Psychic, Astrological, & Reiki Training, invited me to quote freely on the subject from her blog.

It is actually easier for spiritual entities of all kinds (e.g., deceased loved ones, guides, angels) to communicate with us while we are sleeping. Why? Because when sleeping, we are in that ‘in between place’ between our Earthly reality and ‘the other side of the veil’ (the spiritual world). During this time, our rational mind and our ego are not engaged. Things can happen in our dream world that we would normally stop or discount while awake.

There are several characteristics associated with “true” visitation dreams. One of these is that they feel “real.” Also, the dead person typically communicates a strong message of reassurance, and the dreamer will immediately recognize the unusual vividness of the dream. “The person (or animal) will almost always appear in the dream to be completely healthy and behaving in a loving manner. They will rarely appear sick or injured. They will never be angry, disappointed, depressed, or punishing.”

8.
My mother became a Girl Scout troop leader and a vocal PTA member. She was active in the neighborhood and, among other adventures, spearheaded a fund-raiser for the muscular dystrophy association. She filled scrapbooks with family keepsakes and photos, and later, to help make ends meet, took a job as a waitress at a local diner. In 1966 my parents adopted my twin sister and me and although they now had by most standards a satisfactorily-sized family, they continued taking in foster children for the next five or six years. And, one after the other, my fun-loving, hard-working, ever-popular mother brutalized them.

It was not uncommon for her to beat these poor children for trivial offenses, and to viciously berate them. I recollect her screaming at one little boy, who was crying for his mother and couldn’t have been more than five years old, “Don’t think you’re going to back to your mother, because she doesn’t want you!”

A similar scene took place with an older boy, probably around 12, just on the edge of puberty, whom my mother accused, not for the first time apparently, of masturbating in bed and thus soiling the sheets. His fervent denials roused her to a vicious frenzy — she towered over him, belaboring him, slapping him, humiliating him, until finally he gave up on convincing her of his innocence and yelled, “I’ll stop!”

Whenever this happened, it was my father who pulled her off the child, saying, “That’s enough, that’s enough.” He couldn’t bear the violence, a softness for which she ridiculed him. After one incident, in which she challenged a misbehaving six-year-old boy to a fistfight in the bathroom, she turned her ugliness on him, presumably because she’d had to do the dirty work. “What kind of man are you?” she demanded. “You’re no man.” He sat smoking at the dining room table, defeated, embarrassed, and said in reply, “Thanks a lot.” I, in my pajamas, stared at him from a few feet away.

It was his fault she didn’t have a dishwasher, like her sisters did. It was his fault she had to work. It was his fault we didn’t live in Florida, where she always wanted to live, for reasons that were never clear. If there was something wrong with her life — and there always was — it was his fault and she wasn’t shy about letting him know it.

He almost left. After one explosive fight he emerged from the bedroom with a worn, brown suitcase at his side. He stopped and surveyed my sister and me, both sobbing. He put down the suitcase, approached my sister and knelt down. “Why are you crying?”

“Patti said you were leaving!” she bawled, and the sobbing began anew. He looked at us hard. He stood up. “I’m not leaving until you two are 18.” He turned and took his battered suitcase back into the bedroom. Later, my mother made us lunch.

“Grief dreams are a universal experience among mourners,” she wrote in an email.

First, they help us to absorb shock (particularly in the aftermath of the death of a loved one); second, grief dreams help to sort our emotions. These emotions run the gamut from extreme anguish, to anger, to remorse, to even relief. Third, grief dreams can continue our relationship with the deceased. For example, in cases where a child has had a complicated relationship with a parent, dreams can help the survivor resolve problems and issues that were roadblocks in life.

10.
It’s true that my relationship with my father was complicated, at least in my thinking. When I got a little older, I often defended him against my mother’s barbs, only to have him scold me for speaking to her disrespectfully. He frequently took me to the barbershop with him, or to the market, or to the mechanic, and got up early on Sunday mornings to help me on my newspaper route, but during these outings we barely spoke. He showed me how to put chlorine in the pool (because “someday I won’t be here to do it”) and how to cut a two-by-four in half (“let the saw do the work for you”) but had to be harangued by my mother into playing catch with me in the backyard (the only time that occurred). In the year before he died, I started boxing. Three times a week he drove me to and from the gym, and when I won and got my name in the paper he bragged behind my back to friends and neighbors. He never attended any of my fights. I’ll never know why.

11.Ian Wallace, author of The Top 100 Dreams: The Dreams That We All Have and What They Really Mean, believes that dreams are not things that happen to us but, rather, episodes that we create during sleep toward gaining a deeper, better understanding of ourselves and our lives. “As we journey through life and become more mature and experienced, we often begin to connect with personal qualities that may have seemed less available to us when we were younger,” he said.

“In my experience, if either of the parents died prematurely, then it is quite common for the dreamer to create a series of vivid dream episodes when they themselves reach the age that the parent was when they passed on,” he said.

12.
My father quit smoking the day his brother died. He’d taken it up as a kid, had been at it probably 45 years. Winstons. My mother was on him all the time to quit, but he wouldn’t. For as far back as I can remember he had a consistent smoker’s cough that my sister and I used to locate him and my mother whenever we got separated from them in a department store or supermarket. When he laughed very hard it would get caught it his throat and turn into a coughing fit and my best memories are of the few times I was accidentally hilarious at the dinner table, the way kids sometimes are, and got him laughing so hard and coughing so much that he had to stand up and walk around to get his breath back. It was glorious.

In the summer of 1981 my father’s telltale smokers’ hack took on a new feature — a ghastly kind of whistle at the end that seemed something not intended to come out of the lungs of a human being. While in a department store shopping for clothes for my upcoming school year, he confided to me that he’d been getting pains in his back, and night sweats. He said that if he knew it was too late, that his quitting smoking had been pointless, he’d start right up again. In my early-teenage naiveté and narcissism it barely registered: I left the store without the slightest idea that he could be dying.

He took little apparent joy at being alive. He rarely laughed anymore or kidded round. At a restaurant one night, my sister and I bickered. He scolded me and then proclaimed, “Jesus Christ, what am I alive for?” On the positive side, he and my mother started to spend time alone together, to go out to dinner or a movie. They held hands. Then one afternoon in September my mother got off the phone with a doctor and told my sister and me that our father was sick and would be going into the hospital. When he got home from work she led him into the living room and told him what he already knew: It was cancer. He lay on the couch, put his hands over his face and wept. She told him: “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay. We’ll just have to move to Florida.” She was confusing his lung cancer with emphysema, whose sufferers supposedly fair better in hot climates. Or, she was trying to reassure him.

The next morning we prepared to take him to the local hospital, which had a well-earned reputation for being one’s last stop on the way to the morgue. I walked into the dining room to see my father on the phone. He saw me and waved me away. I stood where I had stopped and heard him say into the phone, “Hello, is this the number where people pray for you?”

In the hospital, the doctors told him that they would give him chemotherapy and then remove his poisoned lung, and maybe even replace it with a new, younger one. Then they took us in another room and told us it was hopeless, that he soon would be dead. He figured it out quickly enough and a couple days later the pastor from our church came in and during an otherwise muffled conversation I heard my father say loudly, and not altogether unhappily, “I’m not afraid to die.” My mother hushed him — “Oh, knock it off, you’re not going to die.” But he was. He knew it. And he was okay with it. He even started joking around again and of all the patients around him who also were waiting to die, I was told later that he was the nurses’ favorite.

For the next several days we all sat with him, all day and mostly watched him sleep, the IV bag dripping sweet serenity into his dying veins. Someone decided it would be best if we didn’t miss any more school, so I was sitting in class when he died on an otherwise ordinary Thursday morning on September 17, 1981.

You meet the strangest people on a book tour. One of the strangest – in the good sense – that I’ve met so far on my current tour was standing in a crowded Detroit bar sporting a 1970s Detroit Tigers jersey, a pair of bushy muttonchops and a cumulus cloud of curly hair that made him look like the drummer in a heavy metal band. I recognized the guy instantly. Our pictures were side-by-side in the front window of Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor, where we had just given readings from our new books on successive nights.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Are you Dan Epstein?”
“That’s me,” he said, smiling as he shook my hand. “And you’re Bill!”
I admitted I was, and a writerly friendship was born. We had come to this saloon, Nemo’s, on the thinnest of literary pretenses. The occasion was the annual “Bird Bash,” a loopy celebration of one of the loopiest players ever to wear a Detroit Tigers uniform, Mark “the Bird” Fidrych, whose star blazed brightly but briefly in the summer of 1976, when he was the American League’s starting pitcher in the All-Star game, won Rookie of the Year honors, and captured the hearts of baseball fans across the nation with antics that included talking to baseballs, getting down on his hands and knees to smooth the pitcher’s mound, and returning a ball to the umpire if he sensed “it had a hit in it.” He got his nickname because his gangly physique and mop of fizzy hair reminded people of Big Bird on “Sesame Street.”Epstein and I were supposed to read from our books during the “Bird Bash” because both books have strong ties to Detroit and the Tigers. Epstein’s Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76, includes a loving portrait of Fidrych’s remarkable rookie season; and my novel, Motor City Burning, opens at Tiger Stadium on the Opening Day of the 1968 season and, with flashbacks to the previous summer’s riot, follows the team’s progress to their victory over the St. Louis Cardinals in the ’68 World Series. Beyond all that, Epstein and I attended our first big-league ballgames at Tiger Stadium (mine was at age 9 in 1961, his was at age 10 in 1976), and we both remain fans of the team to this day.But the mob at Nemo’s wasn’t thinking about our books. After watching a videotape of Fidrych’s breakout victory over the Yankees on a “Monday Night Baseball” broadcast from 1976, the crowd trooped one block to the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, where Tiger Stadium stood until its demolition in 2009, and where volunteers called the Navin Field Grounds Crew still tend the hallowed ballfield. After watching a guy re-enact some of the Bird’s antics, we all went back to Nemo’s to drink more beer and listen to a DJ spin “The Bird Is the Word,” some Stevie Wonder, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, and Kiss’s “Detroit Rock City.”
As the beer and music kicked in, it became apparent to Epstein and me that reading from our books would be pointless, so we struck up a conversation that’s still going on weeks later by telephone. After reading both of his fine books – the first one is called Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ‘70s – I told Epstein his writing had helped bring about a seismic shift in my thinking. During the 1970s, when I was getting started as a professional writer, I tuned out all the cheesy pop culture of an era I regarded as a stylistic Sargasso – disco music, hideous cars, atrocious fashions and hairstyles and, yes, baseball played on AstroTurf by guys in gaudy polyester uniforms. In Epstein I discovered a smart writer who actually reveled in the cheesiness of the ‘70s. And he did it without the killing smirk of irony.
Baseball in the ‘70s, as he wrote in Big Hair, “exuded an edgy (and palpably exciting) anything-goes vibe, one that has long vanished from the game as we know it. In recent years, for example, the Atlanta Braves have held a ‘Faith Day’ promotion, featuring performances by Christian rock bands and testimonials from Braves players about how Jesus turned their lives around. This is the same team that, back in 1977, drew more than 27,000 fans for a ‘Wet T-Shirt Night’ competition. Give me the 1970s, any day.”
Amen, brother.
Epstein’s books also make the valid point that prior to the 1970s, baseball players and other professional athletes lived in their own cocoon, insulated from the concerns of the rest of American society. (It could be argued that they’ve returned to the cocoon.) But in 1970 the cocoon started unraveling. Jim Bouton published Ball Four, which dared to point out that baseball players were not the clean-cut, clean-living heroes of popular myth but, as often as not, a gaggle of skirt-chasing boozers and pill-popping reprobates. That same year, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter while zonked on LSD. The fun was just beginning.
And there’s fun on every page of Epstein’s two books. One pitcher’s anemic fastball “wouldn’t have cracked the bubble window of an AMC Pacer.” The perms worn by numerous players “made them look like high school math teachers who hoped to get lucky at the local disco during the upcoming weekend.” And Peter Frampton’s live album from 1976 “oozed ingratiatingly mellow vibes across its four sides, making it the aural equivalent of a Maui Wowie-enhanced cruise along the California coastline in a Camaro.” The man can write.
As Epstein puts it, “Drugs, fashion, pop music, political upheaval, Black Power, the sexual revolution, gay revolution – all of these things left their mark upon ‘70s baseball in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier, and might be just as unthinkable now.”
This is where our books overlap. Big Hair and Motor City Burning both use baseball as a mirror of current events. Epstein, who has written extensively about music, is a rigorous researcher. Here is his take on the 1967 riot that’s at the center of my novel, an event he uses to illustrate how pre-‘70s baseball players were out of touch with what was happening in the streets outside of major-league ballparks:

In his book, The Tigers of ’68, George Cantor acknowledges this complete disconnect, citing as an example the July 23, 1967 doubleheader between the Yankees and Tigers at Tiger Stadium, which the teams played to completion while the deadliest, most destructive riot of the 1960s raged in the surrounding streets. “It was as if the stadium was wrapped in a cocoon,” Cantor writes, “untouched by the catastrophe that was engulfing the city.” He goes on to note that the era’s “Vietnam protests and rallies, love-ins and acid trips were part of a parallel reality, one that did not intrude on baseball’s space.” In the 1970s, that cocoon would pop, and those two parallel realities would collide head-on, resulting in the most colorful era in baseball history.

Well, yes and no. One thing Epstein fails to mention about that July 23, 1967 doubleheader is that after the second game, the Tigers’ popular black slugger and Detroit native Willie Horton, still wearing his uniform, went out into the city’s chaotic streets and begged the rioters to go home. He was heckled and pelted with debris, and the city of Detroit continued to burn.
But Horton’s futile heroics were the exception that proved Cantor’s rule. And Epstein’s point about ‘70s baseball is valid – for better and for worse, it was the most colorful era in baseball history, with its Technicolor polyester uniforms, AstroTurf in ashtray stadiums, free agency, the designated hitter, night-time World Series games, women sportswriters in the locker room, long hair, and mustaches and muttonchops, goofy promotions and goofy players like the Bird, on-the-field brawls and off-the-field shenanigans.
As we stood there in Nemo’s, I remarked to Epstein that K.C. and the Sunshine Band sound a lot better to me today than they did 40 years ago. When the DJ played “Show Me the Way,” I added that Peter Frampton still sucks as bad as he sucked in 1976.
Epstein laughed. “Growing up in the ‘70s, I loved the pop music and the disco and the movies,” he said. “For a 10-year-old kid, Boston’s first album was a magic box. It just made me happy. And listen to a Chic record today – and realize they did it without synthesizers! Eventually I got into soul and funk and Blaxploitation flicks. The reason I wanted to write Big Hair was because it was the era when I fell in love with the game. Then, in the process of researching the era, I fell in love with the era too. But I also have the sense, from the drugs and the war protests and the political scandals, that those were fucked-up times.”
Which goes a long way toward explaining why they’re suddenly becoming so interesting to me.
With his six months of book promotions winding to a close, Epstein and his wife, Katie Howerton, were getting ready to return to their home in Los Angeles. I asked him the question every writer dreads: “So what are you working on next?”
“If I do another book about ‘70s baseball, I’ll be the ‘70s baseball guy forever,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but maybe I should expand. The logical thing would be to write about the ‘80s. But what’s there to write about other than Ronald Reagan, Madonna, crack cocaine and The Wave? I get the hives just thinking about it.”
Whatever he decides to write, I hope he gets busy. I’ll buy any book with Dan Epstein’s name on the cover.

I’m reading The Bros. K. with a good friend, and I’m almost in the exact same place. Still, at 28, I can say there is an inexplicable mystery about the relationship I have with my parents – particularly my father.

It also reminds me of the Curse of Ham, where the subject is cursed for seeing his father naked. His brothers are not because they covered him.

I love your writing. This piece is going straight into my journal as one giant block quote I wish I’d written. Except I might add that I’d be proud if my boy grew up to be an Alyosha (though I would worry about him constantly).

“The family-related truth that I feel in Karamazov is simply that we don’t question our family–it’s just there, our absolute context, inescapable, like the horizon and the sky.” Love it, Shelley.

And thanks, Chris, for the kind words. I will keep that in mind about Alyosha as I continue reading. (Things got good last night- the “Delirium” chapter with Mitya and Grushenka at the Inn culminating in his arrest. I cant wait until nightfall and time to read again!

Kevin, I really appreciated your kind words. Karamazov has always been my favorite novel. I actually read it out loud (bit by bit) to my young daughter years ago, and she taught me that there’s actually humor in this book. Every word uttered by Smerdyakov made her laugh wickedly.

Writers should realize that the novels that are remembered, that become monuments, would in fact be those which err on the part of audacious prose, which occasionally allow excess rather than those which package a story -- no matter how affecting -- in inadequate prose.

Ask any writer about the rules he’s heard throughout the years, and he will be able to recite a litany as deeply embedded as the Lord’s Prayer. Show, don’t tell. Write what you know. The first sentence is key. The last sentence is key. All writing is rewriting. No adverbs. No one aside from you finds your dreams interesting. You should never write in the second person.